Qubes Update sometimes opens as an empty gray window

[SaswatPadhi]

Qubes OS release

R4.2

Brief summary

• The "Qube Update" application window is empty (just a gray window with nothing in it)
• Running qubes-update-gui shows no errors on the console

Steps to reproduce

• Run "Qube Update" from application menu, or
• Run qubes-update-gui in a dom0 shell

Expected behavior

Qubes Update window displays TemplateVMs to update.

Actual behavior

Qubes Update window displays nothing. See attached screenshot.

[hax0rbana-adam]

I can reproduce this issue on my freshly installed 4.2.0 release. If there is any additional information I can provide, please let me know.

[hax0rbana-adam]

I figured out the root cause of this: there was an existing process of qubes-update-gui that was not showing up on the screen. After I killed that process, running the updater from a dom0 shell as a normal user, or running it from the system tray icon worked fine.

If @SaswatPadhi can confirm they have the same issue I had, maybe we can just document this somewhere and close this ticket?

How I determined the root cause

When the updater was in its wedged state, if I ran qubes-update-gui from a terminal in dom0, or launch the updater from the system tray icon, I can reproduce this problem perfectly. However, when I ran sudo qubes-update-gui, the updater worked just fine. This initially led me to believe it was a permissions problem.

I was not sure if using the system tray icon was supposed to be running the updater as root or not, but then I noticed that I had some other process that was running qubes-update-gui as a normal user. After my update completed, I killed the process with the low PID which was being run as a normal user. After that, everything worked fine. I could launch the updater as a normal user from a dom0 shell or from the system tray icon and it was able to update the qubes just fine.

[SaswatPadhi]

Thanks @hax0rbana-adam, I no longer observe this issue and Qubes Update seems to be running normally now. I remember I was setting up apt-cacher-ng and was having issues with updates that day, so it's likely that I had the same root cause.

As you suggested, I am fine with closing this issue with a documentation note, since the issue would disappear after a reboot assuming the root cause you've identified.

[hax0rbana-adam]

I found the documentation on how to update the documentation and it looks pretty straight forward. When I have some spare time, I'll try to figure out where we can document what to people get a grey box instead of the normal Qubes updater, read the style guide, fork the repo, make the change and submit a pull request.

[DemiMarie]

I still think this is a Qubes OS bug: instead of showing an empty gray window, the updater should exit.